Folletto

Also Known As: plural folletti; a diminutive of Italian folle, “mad” or “foolish”, so roughly “little mad one”; also spirito folletto; nicknamed auguriello, “little bringer of luck”; regional names include salvanello, massariol, mazapégul, linchetto, mazzamurello, monaciello, monachicchio, lauro and farfareddu
Region/Culture: Southern Europe
Mythos: Italian Mythology
Primary Type/Nature: Fairy Folk and Spirit Beings
Mythical Attributes: A small night-wandering spirit of houses and stables that brings luck to a household, plays tricks on its sleepers and knows where treasure lies buried.
Role in Mythos: Folletto is the general Italian word for the house sprite, the common type that stands behind dozens of regional spirits with their own names from the Veneto to Sicily.
Relation to Humans: It lives alongside a family, pulling blankets off beds and plaiting the manes of horses, and is mostly counted a sign of good fortune. Anyone quick enough to snatch its cap can make it give up a hidden treasure to get the cap back.

The mare stands quiet in her stall at first light, steam lifting off her back, and her mane has been plaited in the night. Not neatly. The braids are tight little knots no farmhand would have the patience to tie and no comb will take out, and the feed in her manger is deeper than the feed in any other. Nobody in the house is surprised. Somebody small has a favourite.

Italians call that somebody a folletto. The word is a diminutive of folle, mad or foolish, and it fits the creature the way a nickname fits a difficult uncle: the little mad one, the one who cannot be predicted. It is less a single being than a kind of being. Nearly every region has its own, under its own name, and folletto is the plain Italian word that covers them all. In the Veneto there is the salvanello and the massariol. Romagna has the mazapégul, Tuscany the linchetto, Abruzzo the mazzemarelle. Apulia knows the lauro, Naples the monaciello, Basilicata the monachicchio, Calabria the faietta and Sicily the farfareddu. An American folklorist collecting spells in the hills of Tuscany and Romagna in the 1890s complained that country people used the word for almost any spirit that was not a saint.

For all that variety, the portrait is steady. A folletto is small. It has the face of a boy and a head of curly fair hair, and it wears a cap, red in most places and black in some, over a scarlet smock. That is the friendly version. Other tellings add something wrong about the feet, one of them forked like a goat’s or armed with a spur like a cockerel’s, as though the tailor had finished the costume and the maker had not quite finished the body. It keeps to houses and stables and works at night. People hear it more often than they see it: a scuffle in the straw, a thump on the stairs, and sometimes, very late, a thin voice singing somewhere outside.

Its habits are those of a clever child left unsupervised. It drags the blankets off sleepers and leaves them to the cold. It leaps onto passing carts for the ride and climbs bell towers because they are there. In the stable it picks one horse to love, braids her mane and feeds her well, and the others go a little short. In Tuscany and Romagna the local sprite has a heavier trick, settling on a sleeper’s chest until the breath comes hard, and people there still describe a bad night as the linchetto having hold of them. Even so, the general verdict is kind. A house with a folletto in it is a lucky house, which is why one of its names is auguriello, the little good omen.

Then there is the cap. Everything a folletto has seems to be kept under it, and the best-known story about the creature is really a set of instructions. The thing to do is to catch it off guard and pull the cap from its head. Without it the sprite is helpless and frantic, and it will promise anything to have it back. The price to ask is treasure, because folletti know where the old hoards are buried. Carlo Levi, a painter and doctor exiled by the Fascist government to a hill village in Basilicata in the 1930s, heard the same from the farm labourers there about their monachicchi: tiny, quick, hooded in red, endlessly teasing, and worth a pot of gold to the man who could hold on to the hood. None of his neighbours had actually managed it. The rule in Abruzzo is stricter still. A man who weakens and hands the cap back before he has been shown the exact spot gets nothing but laughter.

Where the folletti come from depends on who is asked. In Levi’s village, and in Abruzzo too, they are the souls of children who died before they could be baptised, shut out of heaven through no fault of their own and left to play in the world for ever. It is a sad idea and it explains a good deal: the size, the boy’s face, the mischief without real malice. Students of folklore have preferred a longer pedigree. They see in the folletto the last of the Lares, the small guardian gods to whom every Roman household once set out food by the hearth, worn down by Christian centuries from a god to a nuisance.

The word itself has a darker past than the creature. When Dante walks through the lower pits of hell and a naked, rabid shade comes tearing past with its teeth in another sinner’s neck, the bystander who names it calls it a folletto. There the word means a mad, biting spirit, and nothing about it is charming. By the fifteenth century poets were listing folletti as one class of spirits among several, and by 1824 Giacomo Leopardi could put one on stage as a wit. In his short dialogue a folletto and a gnome talk over the news that the human race has died out, and agree that the world is getting on perfectly well without it.

What a folletto can do follows from what it is: the spirit of the house, awake while the house sleeps. It moves unseen through locked rooms, it has the run of the stable and the strength to work there, it brings luck simply by staying, and it knows what is under the ground. Its mischief is the price of its company.

Its weakness is as plain as its powers. It can be robbed. A being that can slip through a keyhole can still be held to ransom for a scrap of red cloth, and it will pay. There are said to be other protections against its worst tricks, but they belong to particular villages and are told there rather than everywhere. Most households never tried to drive it out. The mare was fat and the luck was good.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is a folletto?

A folletto is a small household spirit of Italian folklore that lives in houses and stables and is active at night. It plays tricks such as pulling blankets off sleepers and braiding horses’ manes, but it is mostly thought to bring good luck. The word is a general Italian term that covers many regional sprites with their own local names.

What does a folletto look like?

A folletto is usually described as very small, with a boy’s face and curly fair hair. It wears a red or black cap and a scarlet smock. Some tellings give it a monstrous detail, such as a forked or spurred foot.

How do you get treasure from a folletto?

The traditional way to get treasure from a folletto is to snatch its cap. The folletto will reveal the place where a treasure is hidden in order to get the cap back. In Abruzzo the tale warns that a person who returns the cap before being shown the exact spot gets nothing.

What are the regional names for the folletto in Italy?

The folletto is called salvanello or massariol in the Veneto, mazapégul in Romagna, linchetto in Tuscany and mazzemarelle in Abruzzo. In the south it is the lauro in Apulia, the monaciello in Naples, the monachicchio in Basilicata, the faietta in Calabria and the farfareddu in Sicily.

Where do folletti come from?

Italian tradition gives more than one answer. In Basilicata and Abruzzo, folletti are said to be the souls of children who died before baptism. Folklorists have also traced the folletto back to the Lares, the household guardian gods of ancient Rome.